How to Start Building Your Brand on Amazon - AMZ with Andy Isom | EP. #55

On this 55th episode of The E-Comm Show, our host and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff is with Amazon veteran and e-commerce coach, Andy Isom.. Andy has been helping people launch their own brand on Amazon. And with his own brand selling over $3 million off the platform, Andy is here to share his secret strategies for reaching the multi-million dollar mark—from PPC strategies to pricing and fulfillment, listen to Andy and Andrew as they talk about the ropes of successfully launching on Amazon.

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How to Start Building Your Brand on Amazon - AMZ with Andy Isom

SPEAKER

Andrew Maff and Andy Isom

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff

Andy Isom

I help people launch their own brands on Amazon. We've sold over $3 million on Amazon with our own brand and continue to grow our own business. I help people get started for free with my #1 ranked Amazon FBA podcast "Selling on Amazon with Andy Isom" and I also provide coaching for those interested in working personally with me to launch and grow their brands.

Transcript:

00:03

So again, my philosophy is kind of I'd rather sell 100 units a month of something to high-income earners. Hey Everyone this is Nezar Akeel of Max Pro. Hi I'm Linda and I'm Paul and we're Love and Pebble.

00:19

Hi this is Lopa Van Der Mersch from RASA. You're listening to and you're listening and you are listening to The E-Comm Show.

00:32

Welcome to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr, the number one place to hear the inside scoop from other e-commerce experts. They share their secrets about how they scaled their business and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host, Andrew Maff. Hello,

00:52

everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. I'm your host, Andrew Maff. And today I'm here with Andy Isom, Andy, how you doing?

00:59

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

01:01

Super excited to have you on the show. You obviously you're the owner of AMZ with an aneurysm, you also have your own podcast, and I would love to pretend that no one knows who you are. Because I also know you have a good sized following on a bunch of different social channels. And we're just going to play dumb for a little while. So why don't you kind of tell everyone a little bit about yourself? Your background? We'll start from there.

01:23

Yeah. I'm Andy Isom, I've been really interested in entrepreneurship for a long time. Now I'm one of those guys who's pretty much tried every online business that you could. I was a big Gary Vee fan early on in college, and then after I graduated from college and was in the corporate world, so I was all about, you know, hustling online and trying different businesses and things and tried a whole bunch of different businesses learned a bunch of stuff. And eventually, it kind of guided me down this road of consulting, business consulting, but also e-commerce. We launched our own e-commerce brand in 2019, with our good friends and neighbors, and have been growing that ever since. And, it's funny as we started to grow and gain momentum with that brand. Some of my followers who, you know, were following me for business content, tutorial content, all sorts of other things, blogging, affiliate marketing, dropshipping. They all kept asking me more and more about Amazon like, Hey, tell us more about Amazon. We want to know how to do Amazon, Amazon. So I'm like, okay. So about two years ago, I really just kind of tried to focus in all of my content. In fact, I used to have a podcast, specifically just about business. But I shut that down and started a new podcast about Amazon. And yeah, shut down a bunch of other businesses, I was running to really focus on helping people with Amazon. So that's kind of what I'm up to now.

02:48

Nice. What? So when you first started dipping your toe into Amazon stuff, what were you selling?

02:53

We started a private-label brand. It's called Remy Unruh. We sell dog products. And we've been doing that since we technically I guess, started in 2018. But we launched in 2019. And we've just been building that brand ever since. Since that time, I've helped other people kind of a partner in some other brands as well. But that's definitely our main brand and our main focus.

 03:15

Nice. So say you started 2019 We're obviously in 2022. I know that you've already, you know, far surpassed seven figures with that brand. What do you feel was some of like the main points that kind of helped you get from, you know, zero up over that million dollar mark?

03:32

Yeah, that's a great question. Something that I preach to people who are just getting started with Amazon private label specifically, but I think it does apply to any Amazon business model, whether you're considering arbitrage or wholesale. The two big keys in my mind that took us from, you know, a couple of $1,000 a month in sales to 150 to $100,000 a month in sales is more marketing and more skews. Those are the two things I try to drive home to people is increase your marketing, whether that's spending more on Amazon Pay Per Click advertising specifically or more marketing off Amazon, and then just having more skews. Those are definitely the two biggest things.

04:14

So did you start to develop your own brand off of Amazon as well? Or do you solely focus on Amazon?

04:22

Our initial game plan was to launch on Amazon and just a little backstory, I guess I had my first experience with Amazon actually, back closer to 2014-2015. I'll just tell it's a it's a quick story, but it was kind of funny to me. I was actually sitting in a business class next to two other kids I guess in my class in college, and they were not paying attention to the professor at all. They were just like kind of huddled next to each other like looking at their laptop and kind of just like chattering quietly and I could not help but like kind of snooping their conversation and like peek like what are you guys looking at? It's so interesting that you Not paying attention. And they had some software pulled up on their screen. And they were looking, I just saw a whole bunch of dollar signs and products that look like something with Amazon. And so I just like, asked him, I was like, Hey, what are you guys doing? And they're like, Oh, we're just looking at Jungle Scout. And this was like back when Jungle Scout first launched was like, right around 2015. And they were looking at, like products and seeing all these huge dollar signs and sales that these products were getting on Amazon. And I ended up talking to them after class and like, yeah, we sell toothbrushes, head replacements, just some generic brand that they come up with for like, electric toothbrushes. That like yeah, we sell like $50,000 a month. And I was like, what? I was just like blown away by that. So anyways, I went home, I looked up Jungle Scout, I figured out what they were and what the software did, and I bought a lifetime license for $49. And now the programs like It's like $70 a month monthly subscription at the time, it was like one time 49 bucks. So I was one of like the first, I guess users of Jungle Scout back in the day, started dipping my toes into Amazon. I was a broke college student though. And I just got married. And my wife and I both played college sports, and neither of us had a job. So we had no money. But I was dabbling in Amazon ordering samples from suppliers in China. But never ended up really taking a deep plunge. But it was it was a way to get kind of get my feet wet. So from that, that experience back in 2015 kind of led us when we were, you know, a few years later, when we had this idea again for Remy Andrew. I was like, Hey, let me get my Jungle Scout out here do some market research. And I kind of have the belief that let's launch on Amazon first kind of started going back to your question of why Amazon have we expanded. My whole philosophy was let's launch on Amazon first because we can gain a ton of momentum there, we don't have to fulfill orders, they do FBA fulfillment is you know, really hands off from the customer order fulfillment process side of things, and obviously the big customer base. So we wouldn't have to stress too much about how we're going to get people to our website, my business partner actually had a good friend, who was kind of I guess, mentoring us as well, who was very successful on Amazon. So we were all in on on the Amazon first approach, focus there, build a brand there, gain momentum there. And once we had some good cash flow, then we would expand expand to our own website, potentially get into you know, retail. So that's kind of what we did. We launched on Amazon and sold there for about a year and a half, then launched our own website just through a Shopify store, just to diversify. You know, try to reach a new audience with different forms of online marketing. And then you know, the next plan will be to see what we can do to try to get into some retail just the philosophy of trying to grow our brand, expand, diversify and add more value to it.

08:00

At what point did you start diversifying off of Amazon start to kind of develop the brand off of Amazon because that tends to be like the big jump everyone gets always a little worried about, especially if they're being really successful on Amazon. They're like, I don't know if I want to go that route or not. Like where do you decide to do that?

08:17

Yeah, that's a great question. We knew that marketing would be a huge challenge. Trying to sell, you know, stuff on your own website through a Shopify store. You're really unless you're doing some sort of paid advertising. Like, how are you gonna get traffic? Right? That's the big trap. That's the big question. How are you gonna get traffic to your website? You're not gonna get a lot of Google organic searches early on. If you don't have a good social media following, you're not gonna get good organic social traffic. So you're gonna have to rely on paid advertising via Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Google, you know, all the different advertising strategies. Well, we knew that would be expensive. We we know that marketing on those platforms is a lot more expensive than running Amazon Pay Per Click ads are these it's a lot more difficult, I should say and a lot more competitive. I know that Amazon ads are definitely getting more competitive. But for the average business owner, being profitable with a Facebook ad is way more challenging than being profitable with an Amazon pay-per-click ad. Yeah, so we knew we needed cash flow. That was the big thing is we needed serious cash flow. So we can pump a ton of money into Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok type of ads, to build momentum on our own website until we could build an email list, do some email remarketing and kind of get that ball rolling. So it wasn't until we had about I would say we're sitting right around $100,000 a month in sales on Amazon. We had probably at the time 30 skews or so. And that's when we were making a good monthly profit, and good cash flow to where we said okay, we can throw some sear use money at Facebook and Instagram ads to give our Shopify store a real chance.

10:04

Yeah. And so did you immediately create a website and start driving traffic to the site? Or did you test driving traffic to Amazon from off Amazon, whether to the product listing specifically or like the storefront or something like that?

10:21

That's a good question. So we started building an Instagram account from day one. We just really felt like for our product, our niche, our brand, our customers were hanging out on Instagram. I mean, we sell to pretty much middle-aged women who love dressing up their dogs. And people are looking at, you know, cute dogs on Instagram. So that was definitely the platform for us. So from day one, it's good point, we're posting on Instagram, building our audience there. And before we ever had a Shopify store, we're just you know, driving traffic to our Amazon list, you know, with our link in our bio and, and stories and telling people go to Amazon, find us on Amazon Find us on Amazon. Back then Amazon didn't really have good attribution for social media. Since that point, they've kind of rolled this out where they're where they have better social media attribution, even to where you know, they're giving you a little bit of credit on your referral fees. If you send traffic from Instagram ad, for example, they're trying to dip into that. So but I should say, but we never actually ran paid Instagram ads straight to Amazon for that reason, because at the time, attribution wasn't really good. So it'd be really hard to know and optimize an Instagram ad for an Amazon listing. It was just straight organic social media. But when we launched our Shopify store, that's when we started running, paid Instagram ads, paid Facebook ads, Google ads, and other types of paid ads, but kind of the strategy that we roll with is Amazon. So we run Amazon Pay Per Click advertising, obviously, organic Amazon search, but that just stays our Amazon Marketing, and then our Shopify store all of our Instagram content, all of those ads, I was mentioning Facebook, Instagram, Tik, Tok, YouTube, whatever, all those go directly to Shopify. So we kind of separate I guess those different marketing channels.

12:13

Have you explored kind of the Omni channel approach? Whether that mean driving traffic from those paid advertising channels to Amazon directly? Or somehow linking your site between the two? Have you thought about doing anything in that direction?

12:27

Yeah, I mean, we've looked into it and Amazon is pushing really hard to kind of, I don't, I don't know how to say this other than trying to sneakily take over Shopify in a way like, with the Buy with prime, but in with multi-channel fulfillment, like, there. And with attribution, like I said, with, you know, giving credit if you if you drive, Instagram, Facebook traffic to an Amazon listing, they'll give you a discount on your referral fees. They're doing everything they can sneakily, to kind of take over that Shopify market, right? And get those sellers who are selling maybe on Amazon and Shopify, just be like, Yeah, forget it, like, let's just sell on Amazon, or just say, keep your Shopify website, but we're gonna fulfill every order through Amazon, we're gonna take payment through Amazon. Yeah, there's a lot and there's even new stuff, they just announced that Amazon Seller this year that they're doing to, again, try to reinforce that strategy of kind of a Shopify takeover. So I mean, we've we've considered it and thought about some of those different things. But we just really liked the idea of diversification. We just, and this is something that I talk to my students about all the time is, is just risk management, managing risk and all aspects of your business, whether that's ordering product from a supplier, or you know, diversifying your brand across different channels. I don't want to put too many of my eggs in the Amazon basket and give them too much control over my business to where if something changes with Amazon, policy changes with Amazon fees change, something changes, that's catastrophic that my business is not completely shut down. Yeah, that's another reason why we use a three-PL. So we have a fulfillment center here actually local that fulfills all of our Shopify orders and houses all of our inventory before it goes to Amazon. And people have asked me like, How come you guys don't just use Amazon multi-channel fulfillment, because you can do that where someone orders on Shopify, Amazon ships it from an FBA warehouse, you can do that. But again, it's just that philosophy of I don't want to put all my eggs in Amazon's basket. Obviously, I'm using them to build my brand and building momentum with them. But I want to have another platform that can stand on its own have Amazon completely shut down. I have another platform, a warehouse, fulfillment operation website marketing, that's completely separate from Amazon. That can potentially thrive or survive if something were to change with Amazon.

15:04

Yeah. Back to the building a brand aspect, building, in my opinion, building a brand, especially from scratch, by starting on Amazon, obviously private label is incredibly difficult. Because really what you got to do in the beginning, really the only options you have are fighting for those keywords and you know, spending and advertising and stuff. What do you think was kind of the thing that helped you break through that initial starting of, you know, kind of getting momentum and actually developing a brand on Amazon without leveraging a lot of the existing marketing strategies that are typical for brand building, like social media and stuff?

15:45

I, a huge key that that I try to talk to my students about and teach them about is making sure that you have healthy profit margin. I think a tactic that worked well, 567 years ago, was focusing on a low price product, like being not being a low price competitor. And Amazon still kind of pushes what they still like if you look at Amazon's commercials on TV and their billboards, it's all about low prices, and fast shipping, like they're still really pushing that to their customers. However, from a seller perspective, with much more competition than there was in 2015, more and more people are selling on Amazon every single day. You simply can't afford to launch a low-priced product. With low margins. That's the that's the big issue is people are, are getting so scared about price like, Oh, my competition is selling for $15, I gotta sell for 14. And they crushed their profit margins, to where they're running at, you know, 20 15% profit margins, you have no money for ads, you can't afford to run ads. And so then people run ads, they're obviously not making money. They're just burning money on ads, they do that for five, or six months, and then realize, this sucks. Like, I'm just paying Amazon and I'm, I'm paying Amazon fees, paying them with ads and losing money from my account, and then they shut down and give up. The way that you really have to thrive and survive today on Amazon is by creating a premium brand. Like you have to create a premium quality product. So we try to help our students build products build brands that are premium quality, and that has a better profit margin than the competition. Because if you have a 40, let's call it a 40% profit margin. And your competition is running at a 10 15% profit margin because of a much lower price product. You can afford to advertise a lot more than they can. I don't even know I can't remember the market or you might remember the name. But there's like the quote out there that's like the business that can afford to pay the most for customers, the business that wins. It's true in E-commerce as well, whoever can afford to pay the most to acquire a customer is a business that's going to win in the long run. Yeah. And that starts with having a healthy profit margin. I swear to it might be like a Zig Ziglar I can't remember. Exactly, but I don't think it's

18:09

that golden. Yeah, I'm not sure sounds like something he would say. Yeah, whatever. But uh, yes, definitely makes it so I'm imagining especially with like the students and stuff you work with, you probably take a very strong approach to strong listing optimization strong, like imagery, content, creative being shown like because that's really the only thing outside of like a storefront and all that's really the only thing you can do to kind of show an elevated brand on Amazon, right?

18:41

Absolutely. Yeah, that's, that's the really tough thing about Amazon, right is you're at the mercy of their listing, like you only get to put food. I mean, it's not your own website, you can't make it as pretty and fancy as you want us to, like, here's your Amazon the same. And really, the only way you really can show the value like the show, hey, this is premium, you should pay more for my product than the competition is with your imagery really. Like yeah, you can write words all day on your listing, but people will trust their eyes more than they're going to trust your words. So if you have very high quality images, video, a plus content, that kind of stuff that really helps kind of get the ball rolling. And then obviously after that, it comes down to reviews, you got to have five-star reviews, which comes down to making a great product. So that's the other thing, right? It's like, have a great listing, you know, invest in high-quality photos, video, that kind of stuff. But you have to develop a great product. You can't just get away with some cheap product, you got to differentiate you got to focus on quality. You really got to have a premium offering that's going to get you those five-star reviews. And if you can kind of get all those pieces working together great listing, great quality product, you got the profit margin, the reviews are great. Then you're in business, you can really pour some gas on your pay-per-click advertising. and really scale up.

20:03

And that's the benefit completely of selling on Amazon, right? It's like it's as you start to get those reviews in you, it's it starts that snowball effect because your organic ranking goes up, etc. But if you are focused off Amazon, while you know there's a strong argument for you have a higher exit, you build a community and you kind of get a snowball effect from that. Outside of that you have like your Google ads or SEO and stuff, and Google doesn't care if your products good or not. They're just gonna rank you based on the words you're using, in some cases, how much you're paying. So it's definitely very interesting. The, you know, kind of what Amazon has built out here. What's your, what's your theory on how q4 is going to look, especially now that we're you know, there's obviously some volatility in the market, everyone seems to be slowing down on purchasing at least that's the current argument. We've seen a lot of people saying they had a really rough September. What are your thoughts on how you think this is going to go? And then how to actually combat that going into this season?

21:03

Yeah, that's actually a great question. In fact, I just talked, I do a weekly live zoom call with my my coaching students. And this topic came up about two or three weeks ago, and I shared some of my thoughts and opinions on it. Jungle Scout actually does Consumer Reports every quarter. So every quarter, they surveyed 1000s of people, I don't know how many 1000 people, and asked them these questions, they asked them about. Are you worried about the current state of the economy? Are you spending less Are you spending more on Amazon? And a lot of data that they gathered in their report did suggest that people were spending less or planned on spending less, given the current state of the economy and the uncertainty. However, what was interesting from the report, and the findings was, there's different income brackets, right of people shopping on Amazon. In fact, if you go on your if you sell on Amazon, you go on your analytics, in your demographics, you can see the income bracket of your customer, you can see like, how many of my customers are in the $50,000 or less income. And I don't ask me how Amazon gets this data, but they're making some sort of calculation somehow and bracketing your customers on what demographic they even have on there, as you can see like their college level and that kind of stuff. Anyways, the results of the findings from Jungle Scout where that lower-income people are far more likely to say, I'm going to spend less, this fourth quarter or I'm shopping less, I'm not, I'm not, I'm buying cheaper brands, I'm not buying the big name brands. So that was something that was really interesting to me. And also kind of talking to some other people, you know, I'm on social media, I get DMS all the time from people. What I'm seeing is the people, the sellers that are suffering, the most seen sales, maybe decline, and as you mentioned, bad September's people that I'm seeing suffer the most are the people who are competing in those low-priced markets, where they're selling to the low income demographic. If you're selling to cheap people, those are the people. And I'm not trying to be demeaning here. When I say cheap people, I guess that sounded really bad. Yeah, when you're selling, when you're bargain, that's what I should say. When you're selling to bargain shoppers, people who don't care about brand and maybe don't care as much about quality, they're just looking for maybe like the lowest price, best value they can find. Those are the people who are very sensitive to the economy. Those are the people who are getting hit hard at home, most likely, versus the high income earners. They're the people who like, they don't care if gas is $4 a gallon, or $3 or $2. They're driving the same amount. They're filling up their Mercedes, and they're going about their day, they don't really care. Yeah, they're annoyed. But like, these high-income earners, they don't really care, it doesn't affect them as much. So if you're selling again, like what we're seeing is, if you're selling to the premium market on Amazon, those prime members who buy the fancy stuff and the nice things, they're still spending their money. So again, like my philosophy is kind of, I would rather sell, let's just say, let's just, I'm just making up fake math here. I'm not good at math in my head, but like, I'd rather sell 100 units a month of something to high income earners. That you know, it's a high higher price product that earns me let's say, sell 100 units and I make $5,000 a month, but it's a high price, high profit, I'm signed high income people, or I could sell 10,000 units a month. barely scrape by with a small profit margin. And at the end of the day, I'm selling to low, low-income people, a low-price product, and I make $5,000. I would much rather sell 100 units and make $5,000 than 1000 units or 10,000 units and make $5,000 to totally different people. Not to mention. The other thing about that too is you're not going to sell as many units you sell 100 units Make 5000 bucks, higher price higher demographic of people. What we've found in research and I've talked to a lot of other people who live by the same philosophy is the people who are willing to pay more usually complain less. In fact, I see with my coaching all the time, like I have high priced coaching programs, that people who are who have money and are willing to pay more are my best students, they don't complain, they don't have it. It's the people who like, barely like qualify for coaching or Allah like throwing everything on a credit card to make it work. They're the ones who are the most high-maintenance to work with. And I think it's the same in E-commerce. So those people that are like, you know, bargain shoppers almost said cheap bargain shoppers, they're the people who are going to look for look for reasons to complain, look for reasons to leave you a bad review.

25:54

And again, once the economy takes a turn, you're gonna see that big dip because you're selling to a bunch of bargain shoppers. So again, that's kind of my philosophy with that, as well as, at the end of the day, it's about the money you make, I don't care if I sell 10,000 units or 100. If I make $5,000 Either option, I'm gonna take the option that I get to work with better client clients slash customers aren't going to complain and leave bad reviews. And it's also easier to manage I only got to manage 100 units, I don't get to manage 10,000 units.

26:24

Yeah. Trust me from the agency world, it's the exact same thing. But Andy, super appreciative for having me on the show love it. Obviously, we'd love to give you an opportunity here to let everyone know where they can find out a little bit more about you.

26:39

Thank you, I appreciate that. I'll just throw out if you want to learn more about me you can just go to my website is www.nba.com.

26:50

Easy enough. Appreciate. Thanks so much for being on the show. Obviously everyone that tuned in thank you as well please make sure you do the whole usual rate review, subscribe, all that fun stuff on whichever platform you want. Or just head over the ecommshow.com And you can check us out there but if not, either way. We will see you all next time. Thanks for joining

27:07

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